DIE GALERIE, in collaboration with M.-F. Toninelli Art Moderne, is pleased to announce its first participation in LA BIENNALE PARIS with a thrilling one-man-show of the French painter and sculptor Alain Clément.   

Fascinated by the intense play of color and light in nature in his hometown of Nîmes, where the French painter and sculptor Alain Clément (*1941) lives and works alongside Paris and Berlin, he sought in his paintings to combine color and light into an indissoluble unity. His oeuvre is characterized by the play of light of the intense sunrays, which flood his studio in southern France on clear days and cast their spectral colors on the walls. Clément captures them in his paintings, works on paper, sculptures and reliefs.  

In his art works, the former professor and director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, dispenses with the traditional perspective and creates space through the interplay of lines and colored surfaces on the canvas. The effect of his art is created solely by the intense colorfulness and playful abstraction that characterises his works. With trendsetting brushstrokes and dynamic swing, he uses strictly geometric elements on the one hand, while on the other hand allowing wide curved bands to glide across the picture surface.

In 1998, the artist finally transported his painterly ideas into space and created his first sculptures, a series of wooden sculptures with polychrome paint. Since then, his predominantly monochrome, color-intensive reliefs and sculptures - today made exclusively of steel - have been in close dialogue with his paintings and gouaches. The broad brushstrokes, moving ribbons and segments of his paintings develop in three-dimensional space into a painted, steely yet lively structure of form and space, in which the heaviness of the steel gains a lightness, something moving, almost dancing, through the spatial openness and transparency.       

Alain Clément evolved from figurative painting to abstraction and has recently begun to evoke figuration again in his nude paintings. A fascinating development can be seen in his works from 2016 to 2019: Swings and arcs break open, so that the corners and edges created penetrate into the background and at the same time emerge from it again. It is the beginning of a new, dynamic phase in which the colored surfaces overlap, weave and interweave. The artist's current paintings appear youthful and fresh and arouse curiosity about the future development of his formal language.  

The artist’s fascination with art history continues unabated; his artistic role models include Gauguin, Braque, Léger and Matisse, but also the German Expressionists, whom he discovered early during his first visit to Germany in 1970. He draws inspiration and new impulses from them without ever quoting. 

Alain Clément has been an established figure in the French and German art scene for many years, already in 1982 the Museum Ludwig in Aachen dedicated a large solo exhibition to him. In addition to the Centre Pompidou, his works can also be found in the collections of the Kunsthalle Hamburg and Bremen and the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf.  

Our presentation at LA BIENNALE PARIS combines early paintings from the 1990ies with sculptures and reliefs and recently composed canvases in 2019. This cross section through the oeuvre of Alain Clément gives a great impression of the artist’s development as painter and sculptor.